Case Study: Ledvance
“We’re going four times faster than before.”
The project
Ledvance is a global electrical lighting distributor that is shipping items to major retailers from multiple locations.
Its 500,000 sq ft central location facility in Kentucky services most of the US and Canada.
Among its major customers are Home Depot, Menards, and Target.
The problem
Labor costs and labor availability for warehouse workers were becoming more of an issue.
“Our biggest concern is the labor market. We want to do things more efficiently and we are having a hard time hiring people. Everyone I talk to, everybody is having the same problem.” says, Ben Byarly, Director of Logistics at Ledvance.
The large number of fork trucks requires many skilled operators and having skilled operators is critical to promoting a safe environment. Also, training new associates and drivers takes time which can impact the operation.
“We want to go …. faster..” and we want to “invest in our people and teach them new things., while keeping our workers safe.
The solution
Having a solution that can reduce labor and minimize training for associates was important. Flexibility and scalability were also important to accommodate their changing SKU mix.
Ledvance management determined that Goods to Person AMRs (Autonomous Mobile Robots) were a great solution to reduce manual labor, enable faster training of new associates, and be flexible and scalable.
Our Good to Person AMRs were determined to have the best value after evaluating Geek+, Kuka and our solutions for performance, service, and cost.
The results
Ben Byarly, sums it all up, “We’ve been able to eliminate over half of our forklifts. Forklift safety is a big responsibility for the company because when people and forklifts engage, that’s usually where accidents can happen.”
“Adding in these robots has helped us reduce our training time from about 3 to 4 weeks to a day. You just have to train them on what I would call quite an easy system to learn.”
“Our profitability is really about our cost. We’ve been able to improve our efficiency four times, we’re going four times faster than we were before. “
“We made the right choice to put in Goods to Person robots. We were able to automate, reduce our cost, improve our efficiencies, and productivity.”
